Office furniture’s throughout the history

There is no doubt that the office is not what it used to be. This hierarchical space, with dull colours and a plant relegated to a corner of the office without personality, has passed away. The worker well-being is today, one of most important things when we talk about create workspace and environments that promote the comfort, and productivity, of the employees thanks to the correct distribution and to the office furniture’s.  

But, when did the changes begin? And who or what caused it to happen? The truth is that the big changes dot does not happen for no apparent reason, they are usually motivate for a need to adapt to a new situations, normally unexpected, that changes the way the people lives, the economy and the world as we knew.

The workspaces and the office furniture´s adapt to history

The arrive of industrialization brought with it the office jobs. This way of work, began to take shape during the 19th century, a period time when clerks were considered part of the social elite (oral and written knowledge of the language was required and, a certain specialisation at commercial levels). Gradually, this new business process needed more and more administrative tasks, including rational approach to manage invoices, record keeping, etc. Between 1860 and 1920, administration and bureaucracy taken over the business world.

Since the beginning of this new way of working, there has been a debate on the table that makes the offices go through an evolutionary process according to the demand and needs of the workers.

1. The Taylorim (ca. 1904): Frederick Taylor, north American engineer, was obsessed with the  efficiency and supervision in the work place. His obsession for it achieve to recognise as one of the first persons in design an office. Taylor created an open space where workers were sited in rows facing to the private offices in which the bosses were located, in order to the bosses could supervise the employees at every moment.
2. Bürolandschaft (ca. 1960): in the western Germany, the work system starts to rethought and new organisational spaces were created according to objectives and work group. In this way, at the end of 50’s, the Schnelle brothers created the first planned office system. Their idea was deleting rows of desks and design a spacious, well-lit and serviced spaces.
3. The Action Office (1964): this was the first office system with modular furniture, flexible work surfaces and low dividers, but it high cost made it difficult implement at first. So, in 1968, the Action Office II model was born, a more economically accessible version that combined independent and interchangeable panels with work modules, facilitating the possible modification of the work environment as required. This model is still in use today. 
4. Cubicle Farms (ca. 1980): this office model was born in the 1980s and was based on the partitioning of space into cubicles. As middle management proliferated, a new class of employee was created, one too young to have an office with a window and too important to have a simple chair and desk. Thus, the sea of cubicles was born, an economical way for facility managers to created separate spaces without having to rework existing space.
5. Open Spaces: a return to the origin. These are offices whose design is based on creating diaphanous and undivided work spaces, in which workers have more possibilities of having contact with each other. Thus, achieving a more collaborative environment and a more optimised space. Currently, this is one of the office models most commonly used by corporations.    

Storage spaces as office furniture’s

When we talk about the evolution of offices, we can understand that it’s a transformation that affects all areas of these spaces; from the way employees work and interact with each other, to the furniture that equips the spaces.

One of the office furniture that has undergone changes and adaptations throughout history are cupboards and lockers. Not only have they adapted their shape and design, but they have also changed material, thickness and weight.

Pay attention, we are now going to tell you a bit of history.

But, what modular office furniture’s? 

According to the lawyer, Joaquín Aguirre Loustau (1959), “the modular office furniture’s is based on different loose parts, which in themselves constitute the different services for carrying out the work, which are adjustable among themselves, and whose conjunction among themselves, in various positions, makes them useful for forming work stations of different characteristics and nature, saving physical space while at the same time extending the work surface in a greater proportion than the sum total of their respective surfaces would represent.

In the case of storage office furniture’s, we can find modular lockers, this lockers are sold in the most IKEA style, a kit prepared in a box, in which the customer will find everything necessary to assemble his locker and place it in the right place, these are mostly made of metallic materials such as steel.

Maybe it’s to save time, but in general our customers prefer to have the lockers delivered once they are already assembled, which makes their work easier, saves them time and avoids possible errors during assembly.

As far as already assembled lockers and cupboards are concerned, we find that there is a much wider variety of materials, such as phenolic, melamine, PVC, etc.

With the beginning of the industrialization and the creation of jobs for office workers and managers who needed an office, they began to need safe and organised spaces in which to store objects and business documents. This is how cupboards and the first lockers for the office sector came into being.

Gradually, however, these lockers and cabinets evolved to lighter, cheaper, and simpler materials for mass production.

But its evolution is not only based on the change of materials. The real revolution of the lockers came from the hand of digitalisation, the internet, and the rise of online shopping. All these factors meant that the sector had to adapt quickly to the growing demand from ecommerce consumers, which led to the emergence of smart lockers and electronic lockers.

Materials for office furniture’s